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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25598347">(Discord)</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Beatingheartanthem/pseuds/Beatingheartanthem'>Beatingheartanthem</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Canon - Manga, Canon Compliant, Canon Universe, Heavy Angst, M/M</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-07-29</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-07-30</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-05 06:02:57</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>7,682</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25598347</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Beatingheartanthem/pseuds/Beatingheartanthem</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>[*Spoilers up to CH. 105] The night before leaving Paradis Island, the Survey Corps soldiers camp out on the beach. Story told in non-sequential narrative. (Eren/Levi)</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Levi/Eren Yeager</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>4</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>25</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>(Discord)</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Just a short thing I posted to my ff.net account in 2018. Wanted to post it on here too. I was asked a long time ago to post it on ao3. but never did. whoops... 😓</p><p>I've been writing Eren/Mikasa lately. But I do miss Eren/Levi.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Liquid silver light ruffles on the ocean’s surface, unfurling beneath the suspended, handless clock-face of the moon. The moon hasn’t moved in hours. It is a bright and full moon pulling out the shadows of men and women and pitched tents which rattle, sporadically, with the wind. The men and women and their shadows remain motionless. Flames rise inside a circle of stones. Soldiers sit, the firelight shedding over their bodies, thickened within their eyes like flattened burning glass. Their eyes are all fire, with all the anonymity of dead people.</p><p>One of the motionless figures summons an instrument with five wires that run through a long neck. The strings vibrate and expel a sound. A sudden wind springs up and carries it down the coast. Inside their pristine uniforms, anonymous figures listen to it wafting on the wind. The one among them holding the instrument seems to come to life then, repossessing an identity (Connie Springer of the 104<sup>th</sup> trainee squad) as his hands command the instrument with a vague, unnurtured talent.</p><p>Slowly, and it could be the wind or it could be the music, the motionless dead men and women sitting around the fire begin to resurrect like paper lanterns filling with warm air, rising. And rising along with them, a steady voice. Heads turn and listen.</p><p>We’re standing face to face / With our last days / Our sons and daughters pay / For the sins of the past / A tainted history / Our forgotten legacy</p><p>(Please remember me)</p><p># # #</p><p>The music swells in a crescendo, and fifties bodies or so swirl across the ballroom floor.</p><p>The military dress uniforms are elaborate; starched; a deep matte blue. Veterans are furnished with gold tassels. Royal velvet capes mark military leaders. Patent leather shoes gleam brilliantly. The embellishments of buttons and gold and shoe polish don’t do much for the eye. It is the pristine white gloves which the attention is pulled to; gloves of a puritanical glaring white, occupied by steady hands, jutting from the blue, starched sleeves, as though unattached to the soldiers themselves. Disembodied, the gloves take hold, spinning dance partners across the marble floor like spirits.</p><p>When it is time for the feast, the music ceases and soldiers and guests move to another room. Appropriate people find their appropriate seats, taking their puritanical white gloves with them. At the head of the table, Queen Historia gives her formal toast. The pristine gloves rise. Dining begins.</p><p>After much of the eating has been done, guests sit at the table, gossiping, and with too many voices packed into one place, it becomes meaningless sound. Music is playing, mostly strings. The voices quiet down when a chime rings.</p><p>A grizzled hair man with a drooping belly introduces himself. An artist from the inner city. The guests know him as a prestigious man, very well-known. He says, As a gift to the queen and, Yes, of course, the brave soldiers of the Survey Corps, he’s brought a painting. And they (the guests) know the painting is greatly anticipated by scholars and aesthetes and the aristocracy, and the artists says, It’s a painting of which pain and tragedy are not the subjects but are the mediums in which hope can bloom, and he yanks his hand with a kind of smug showmanship. The drape falls away. A framed portrait of magnificent proportions emerges. Light strikes the gold frame. The dining hall becomes shrouded by an uneasy quiet.</p><p>It is Eren Jaeger nailed to a crucifix.</p><p>People begin to mutter and appraise, turning toward each other without moving their eyes from the painting, and neither at the front nor at the end of the table, somewhere in the middle sits Eren Jaeger, who doesn’t move and tries not to be looked at, feeling dislocated, ashamed somehow that he is dead. In the painting, he’s hanging with his arms spread from his body, his head dropped to his chest, his feet limp above the ground, naked. His eyes are gently shut against the sad anguished horror of being dead.</p><p>At the front of table, Commander Hanji and Captain Levi stare at the painting with rigid eyes like statue eyes. They don’t move, don’t turn to each other. Levi begins to speak. The nobles strain in their seats, ceasing their own conversation, listening hard. They watch the small movement of his mouth. Before the silence can occur, the first words are lost. And thus:</p><p>“—butchered like a lamb to absolve your ancestors’ sins,” Captain Levi is quietly saying, his mouth hardly moving, “the sins of your father and your mother and their fathers and their mothers and on back to the very origin of history—” </p><p>Hanji laughs. She clasps his shoulder. “What a jokester.” Rigid white fingers grip him. Behind her glasses, Hanji’s one good eye stares whitely at Levi.</p><p>“You’ll sentence him to death for the sake of useless abstract ideals—”</p><p>“<em>Ha ha ha</em>,” Hanji says, grinning. “He’s had too much wine.”</p><p>“—of forgiveness and peace. The lot of you. Is this the role you’ll assign him, to hang and die on a cross? Because he’s stupid enough to—”</p><p>There’s the faint sound of vertebrae grating in Levi’s neck. Levi goes still. His mouth ceases. “I believe that’s enough, Captain,” Hanji says, gripping him by the scruff, still grinning. “Why don’t you have some water?” Hanji’s fingers uncurl. Impressed on the back of Levi’s neck are five little fingernail crescents. Levi doesn’t drink any water.</p><p>Mikasa bends her head and resumes eating, and the other soldiers and guests soon follow. Across the table, Jean lifts his chalice. Eren gestures with his hand. “Look, Jean, I’ve become a work of art. Where’s your painting?”</p><p>Jean sputters a little in the cup. “It’s your corpse that’s become a work of art, idiot.”</p><p>“Where’s your painting?” says Eren.</p><p>“I don’t need one. I’m staying alive, thanks. You can go and cross the ocean and die and become a painting if you want.”</p><p>“Actually, he’s the messiah,” says Armin. “That’s how the story goes.”</p><p>“Hear that? I’m the messiah,” says Eren.</p><p>“You don’t even know what that is, dumbass. Stop making jokes. You’re not doing anybody any favors. Least of all, Mikasa.”</p><p># # #</p><p>Nameless soldiers let the fire burn and highlight their dark, introspective gazes. Some sit on large trunks of driftwood. Others sit on the sand. A second fire blazes a little away, and a third too, all burning in the night on the coast.</p><p>At Floch’s side, Eren sits on a log, the fire on his eyes like pools of flame. The queen approaches. She wears a button shirt and a rustic skirt, her long blond hair spinning over her shoulder. Pulled under Historia’s shadow, Eren’s eyes go dark, cut off from the light. She puts her hands on her knees and bends down to look him in the face.</p><p>“Connie has some talent. Who would’ve guessed?” she says, and goes silent. Eren stares. “Why don’t you dance with me?”</p><p>Eren stares, his eyes lost mirrored fire. “I’d rather not.”</p><p>“Let me guess. You’ll sit there and brood over tomorrow until you make yourself sick with uncertainty. Isn’t that a little pathetic?” Historia looks Eren in the face and doesn’t move. They say nothing, staring each other in the eye. “I’m not asking you to dance because I want to.”</p><p>“Why don’t you ask Jean to dance?” says Eren, with less detachment now. His elbows push off his knees. Partway, his posture unfolds.</p><p>“You know why,” says Historia, in her firm, sensible queen’s tone. “It must be you, Eren.”</p><p>Pride has been lost long ago, and Eren rises and follows her to a patch of empty beach at the edges of the campfire. She puts herself inside the frame of his arms and square shoulders, and together they dance. Remote and a little forlorn, the fire burns and breathes flakes of smoldering ash into the wind.</p><p>Historia leans close, pressing herself along the flare of Eren’s chest and ribcage. Their legs weave forward, back, sidewise, slowly, in time with the music. Their bodies brush and it is less of body and more of neutrality, the way they touch, interwoven between the folds of obedience and inevitability.</p><p>There’s an applause of wolf whistles, a holler or two.</p><p>Eren presses Historia’s hand to his chest bones, over the middle of his sternum, his gaze steadied while her head goes back, accommodating his greater height. Their eyes look into each other, never looking away. They rotate like figurines turned by little metal machineries inside an old music box. They are consumed in piecemeal.  </p><p>They dance very close. They dance very slow. They dance as if it is more than dancing; as if close could be closer, with a genuineness in their presentation; but in their purpose, all the pretenses of performers. Not unlike, Eren supposes, the façade Christa Renz. Not unlike the smoke and mirrors misrepresenting his own relevance and worth: Humanity’s Last Hope, the most exquisite illusion he’s ever believed in. History, he knows now, is only a cherry-picking of lies force-fed to the collective. And Humanity’s Last Hope is only a fruit cropped on the tree of unrealized dreams, with a large bitter pit of disillusionment borne inside it.</p><p>For the sake of performance, Historia lifts her leg, dragging it up Eren’s thigh in a sensually crafted movement, to wrap herself around his hip, nearly exhibitionistic in essence, the upskirt easily and publically accessible to Eren. The skirt hem teases away from her kneecap. A perfect freckle like a drop of ink, there. Where the skirt has slipped down, Eren seizes her thigh, his fingers pressing on its girlish roundness, soft female flesh pouring from his grip. Under her skirt, she can feel him.</p><p>More whistles.</p><p>Beneath Historia’s skin gathers an elastic heat, clustering in her clothing, and she thinks, Why am I getting flustered? This was her idea, after all, and he is only Eren Jaeger. But not only is he Eren Jaeger. He is all those souls from the past whom came before Eren Jaeger, and he is all those souls in the future whom will succeed Eren Jaeger. “As always,” she says, whispering tightly, feeling the eyes consume them, feeling him, just barely, under her skirt, “you play your role to the best of your ability. You make a good soldier.”</p><p>“But I’ve changed,” he says, “haven’t I?”</p><p>She smiles. It is a tight smile.</p><p>She wants to mourn him.</p><p>“I’m not the person I used to be,” he says. “You would agree, right?” On her leg his grip slackens, her foot sinking back into the sand. They’ve ceased dancing, though the music goes on. She doesn’t back away, remaining as close as close can be in the context of soldier and queen.</p><p>“You’re still Eren Jaeger,” she says. “Maybe you’re not the same. I couldn’t tell you the answer to that. But to me, you’ve always been a good friend.”</p><p>Eren takes her hand and puts his lips on her knuckles. “Your Majesty.” His head remains bowed and she thinks to tell him that he shouldn’t recklessly show the back of his neck; that he should exercise more caution, she thinks to call him an idiot too. An unfortunate idiot.</p><p>“I can never grow accustomed to my friends calling me by those silly titles,” she says, blushing. Her hand turns to touch his face. His jowls are grained with stubble. “Whatever choice you make at the critical moment, you’re the person I’ll always rely on. No matter the consequences.”</p><p>When he lifts his head, his eyes close against the grief and uncertainty and open again. “Yes, well—”</p><p># # #</p><p>
  <em>A Fragment: 01 / Red Ribbon</em>
</p><p>The twelve-meter titan falls dead without the soldiers doing much of anything.</p><p><em>Victory</em> \ vic·to·ry \ ˈvik-t(ə-)rē \</p><p>: victory in battle or a physical contest</p><p>Although they haven’t done much of anything, revitalized hope runs like a scarlet ribbon through the hearts of the Survey Corps. And as hope runs, Levi watches Eren crumble to half-mast, a hand flying to his face to suppress the free-flowing scarlet ribbon that has run through the hearts of the Survey Corps and now begins to spin out of Eren’s nostrils, unbridled. Blood streams between his fingers, down his chin. Levi slides to a knee.</p><p>Levi doesn’t touch Eren, simply gives him a rag to mop up the bloody nose. A few stray drops may land on Levi’s fingers. Or they may not. He feels it, though. He feels a blooming wet warmth as if he’s cupping his hands beneath Eren’s chin to catch the bloodstream that falls from his face, letting it pool in his palms until it runs thickly through his fingers.</p><p>Eren dabs at the nosebleed, his head down, bowed under the weakness of mild anemia, and Levi feels the compulsion to put a hand under Eren’s chin, lift his face. He doesn’t. Without touching Eren, watching him dab at the nosebleed, Levi says to Hanji, or to anyone nearby, or to himself: His power is not infinite—and neither is his body.</p><p>At that, Eren lifts his chin. The full weight of his eyes comes upon Levi, arresting Levi in kneeling position, just in front of Eren, with little distance between their faces.</p><p>Pressing the rag to his nose, Eren says, <em>I’m just a little tired, is all . . .</em></p><p><em>Deteriorate </em>\ de·te·ri·o·rate \ di-ˈtir-ē-ə-ˌrāt , dē- \</p><p>: a gradual decline, as in quality, serviceability, or vigor</p><p>Kneeling beside Eren, feeling the blood growing in his hands, Levi sees Eren nailed to wood posts, he sees a blade hanging over Eren’s neck, he sees the hot barrels of guns, aimed at the ready, he sees all of this coming down on Eren at once, and he sees Eren down on his knees, saying, <em>I’m just a little tired, is all.</em></p><p># # #</p><p>The fire burns and the stars above them let down a heatless antiquated light. Levi tautly side-eyes Mikasa. He sits on a felled tree. She stands with her arms crossed, her old muffler, dark in the night, flapping behind her shoulder. “Should I be concerned?” he says.</p><p>Mikasa removes her eyes from Historia, putting them on Levi instead. Her hair conceals her forehead, her face, the muffler tugged high over the chin. “For what reason?”</p><p>“You were giving the queen a disturbing look,” he says. “I can only assume, then, you were also having disturbing thoughts.”</p><p>The muscles in Mikasa’s jaw stiffen. “They were too close.” She turns a cheek, her posture insulated by tightly folded arms. “It was unnecessary.”</p><p>“You’re not wrong.”</p><p>From a large wooden crate, stamped with the royal insignia, Levi takes up a bottle and tosses it across the shoulder. It flies from his hand toward Mikasa. Her eyes don’t move, the fire flickering in her dead-straight stare. At the last second, her right hand flings out; the bottle claps into her palm. Her face hasn’t moved at all.</p><p>Lifting her wrist, she brings the bottle to her eyes rather than the other way around. Levi continues speaking: “However, those two are unnatural with each other. They weren’t being honest.”</p><p>“That’s not how it looked to me.”</p><p>“You weren’t looking closely enough, then.”</p><p>The captain opens his bottle. She opens hers too, though she doesn’t drink from it. Passively clutching it, she looks at Levi. His face, his body are very still. The night falls on him. His eyes carry the indelible ageless wisdom of being born in the underground. A stain sunk in the fabric of his disposition.</p><p><em>How closely were you looking?,</em> she thinks. Sitting hunched on the felled tree, Levi drinks without devotion or intent, the bottle’s neck hanging from his fingertips. His face is impenetrable, slight; his eyes pale and nearly colorless. Like statue eyes, they don’t reflect the light.</p><p># # #</p><p>After Eren discloses the lost memories of his father, Levi starts to carry it. He carries it in his pocket, and he holds it in his fist at night. It emits a sound that marks the mechanical passage of time; miniature cogs that turn and click into the chronological cycle of one, two, three, four, and so on. Levi can hear it go with each second. One less second. One less minute. One less moment. And all these less-thans turn into one less month, which turn into one less year. And Levi continues to carry it in his pocket, listening to the march onward, the undoing windup of, <em>what was it?</em>, seven years, Eren had said. And that is more-than now. And now is less-than when he’d said it. And since then the clock has ticked down. Six—is now.</p><p>Six.</p><p>Eren’s hair has grown too long. And the unwinding of time has wrought his face with firm cheekbones and a jaw that articulates the insurmountable grief he’s sustained since the fall of the wall. Loss upon losses.</p><p>Six and less than.</p><p>His shoulders are wider, his legs are longer, his face has matured with a continuity of history that runs backward and forward, and perhaps sideways as well, and he bears the past of phantoms and ghosts all in his face. He does not smile.</p><p>Six and less than another.</p><p>In the training room, Eren lifts weights and his neck pulses and Levi carries it and watches Eren’s neck pulsing and it emits the mechanical sounds and Eren’s neck is just the same, pulsing, the mechanics ticking and ticking.</p><p>Six and less than and less than and less than . . .  etc.</p><p>it is only a matter of time.</p><p># # #</p><p>It ticks in his pocket as Levi tosses Eren a drink; it is midnight. The liquid sloshes inside the bottle with a faint ring. Eren looks at his own hands, then looks at Levi, seeing the captain upend his bottle, lips clamped purposefully about the rim. In the fire’s backlight, Levi’s adams apple turns up in profile, gliding lengthwise, swallowing with an active strength now. Eren pops open the top. Modestly he drinks.</p><p>It doesn’t take long for drinks to circulate. It takes less time for alcohol to inhibit motor senses and good judgment. Memories swim inside slow encumbered minds, and the Survey Corps reiterate stories of the past, some stories which resurrect the dead, some stories which should remain, altogether, un-resurrected. Alcohol lightens the gravity of being and abbreviates foresight. The future floats at a weightless, inconceivable distance.</p><p>Eren laughs.</p><p>Eren laughs and he drinks, although he will massacre civilians and children, and smear his hands with irredeemable sins, though this lies somewhere across the ocean, into the inconceivable distance. Right now he laughs because Mikasa is drunk, and the air and the lightness have possessed each part of Eren, as though he’s being pumped with pure undiluted laughter. Mikasa is obliterated. Perhaps he is too. Trying to breathe, Mikasa melts under a heavy languor and drags her head into Eren’s lap, resting on him, her heart pounding.</p><p>“Hey, don’t fall asleep,” he says.</p><p>Mikasa gazes up at him, her face melting away. Under his eyes, she’s disappearing. “I’m too uneasy to fall asleep,” she says.</p><p>“About tomorrow?”</p><p>“No, I have an uneasy feeling about you and the captain.”</p><p>Eren looks at Mikasa. She breathes thickly, a harsh sloppy breathing. “Me and Captain Levi?” he says.</p><p>“Yes,” she says. “The two of you are incompatible.” Her eyes roll up. Her neck goes limp.</p><p>“Hey—don’t fall asleep.” He shakes her. Her head rolls.</p><p>“Careful.” From the east, where the ships reside in silhouetted iron oversize, Captain Levi returns to the fire. Eren hadn’t even seen him leave. The captain is wearing plain black casuals, striding through the night, his hands pocketed, hardly an outline. His shoes whisper on the sand. “She’ll be sick soon,” he says.</p><p>Beneath Eren’s palm, Mikasa’s bloated stomach heaves. Her mouth protrudes and her head stretches over his knee. He catches her hair before her stomach juices spew into the sand. She vomits three times, leaking moisture from her eyes. Her neck strains with arteries and cords.</p><p>With his knuckles, Eren brushes back her hair and holds it away. She gasps in a flood of oxygen and empties out the emptiness, her mouth bulged into a suffocating <em>Ohhh</em>. Eren releases her hair and takes her by the bicep.</p><p>Fishing her up from the ground, Eren rises and thrusts Mikasa’s knees out and drops down in a squat, his arms stuck out in front of him to swoop her up as she’s falling, all in one soft motion. He carries her like a plastic mannequin down the beach. The captain follows a little behind. As they walk, the down-hair on Eren’s neck bristles at the feeling of being watched. He keeps walking, feeling the captain looking at him. The wind has strengthened, blowing fierce whitecaps on the water. They say nothing while they walk.</p><p>Ahead of them, the campfire grows larger; the crackling grows warmer, grazing their skin, and Eren lifts Mikasa up and away from his chest with the strength of his arms alone. He sits in the sand, never jostling Mikasa more than a centimeter. She sinks, nearly floats down, into his arms with a relaxed face, full of color, breathing from her open, sleeping mouth like a child. Eren doesn’t hear it, doesn’t see it when the captain sits beside them. He’s just there suddenly, drinking from a glass bottle, like he’d been there first and it was Eren who sat down next.   </p><p>“I should’ve paid Mikasa more attention,” Eren says. “She’s in this state, and we’re embarking tomorrow.”  </p><p>Levi drinks, sitting very still in the firelight.</p><p>Suddenly Eren laughs, as though he can’t contain himself; as though the laughter has no start and no end, a single indefinite laugh with no beginning. “She looks ridiculous,” he says. The laugh fumbles across his face, for the alcohol has removed the anxiety and the grief. Left inside him is only air and lightness.</p><p>With a high tolerance for almost anything, isolated in the company of dreamy floating faces, Levi's sobriety doesn't lessen any. He watches the booze squeeze laugh after laugh from Eren's gut. Mikasa sleeps soundly in Eren's arms. The sobriety causes Levi to drink more. The sobriety causes Levi to think more. Logs of firewood ruffle with ash and pulse with embers. Levi grinds an empty bottle into the sand. He takes up another. He opens it and drinks.</p><p>“You’ll never be satisfied,” says Levi, and lifts the bottle toward his lips, “will you?”</p><p>“What are you saying, all of a sudden?” Eren doesn’t look at Levi, as if he knows exactly what Levi is saying, all of a sudden.</p><p>“You’re like that fire.” The light shudders over Levi's inscrutable facial features. “Anything that gets too close to you will go up in flames, and you’ll only keep charging ahead until it all lays to waste. What do you want, Eren? Because it seems to me you’re running blind. Are you going to make every living person that exists beyond this insignificant dingleberry of an island your enemy?”</p><p>“That isn’t the ideal,” Eren says.</p><p>“I see. So what comes next? Peace is only an arms race, and the outside world will never forgive you. History will paint your portrait in infinite hatred. Are you all right with that?”</p><p>“I don’t know if I’m all right with it. But in any case, I wouldn’t ask for something I don’t deserve. Forgiveness is too kind, and I don’t expect kindness.”</p><p>“Yes, you’re not so naïve.”</p><p>The smell of smoke softens Levi’s thoughts. The coastal breeze attenuates the dull, irremovable sense of loss. Turning at the neck, Levi pulls in the image of Eren, his hair and his eyes, the warmth of alcohol on his mouth, smelling the smoke.</p><p>All of this together, of the closeness and the light, has synthesized into the perfect alchemy. Levi cannot determine, exactly, when everything has become soft and tender. But it is soft now, and tender. And Eren isn’t so naïve anymore.</p><p>###</p><p>
  <em>A Fragment: 02 / Incompatible</em>
</p><p>The concentrated fumes of blood and sweat and burnt flesh surge up Levi’s nasal cavities. The blood and sweat and fumes bathe him in layers. Levi feels it running down his face, smearing his vision, running down his back, down his thighs, his clothes clung to his body, running over him in red profusion, as though he is swimming inside an open hemorrhage. Ash and brass pour across his tongue. He’s suffocating in it.</p><p>An onset of spent adrenaline inflicts Levi’s hands. His body’s energy has begun to fail. He labors to hold himself against the gravity and the great weight of deterioration coming upon him. A great weight of responsibility too, as across the rooftop, the black burnt body of Eren’s childhood friend hisses expiring breath. The smell of burnt human flesh heaves the muscles in Levi’s stomach. He cannot stop smelling it.</p><p>“Captain,” Eren says, coming forward with his hand reaching in a grasping, uncompromising way. His eyes, likewise, do not yield scope for compromise, as he levels them, depressing his chin a little, to look straight into Levi’s face through a hot downward glare. “Give me the serum.”</p><p>Levi doesn’t give Eren the serum, holding the box within a threshold of indecision. Floch watches the captain, impatiently. The commander is dying.</p><p>Levi’s hand retracts. He breathes in burnt human flesh.</p><p>“We’re giving Erwin the serum,” he says. The ash and death fill his lungs, and before Eren has even begun to move, Levi bristles with the knowing, knowing what will happen, knowing since the beginning.</p><p>Levi has always known, what with the friction between their personalities and priorities, that this is where they’d find themselves. And as well as this, outside Levi’s knowledge, the conspiracies of history have guided the flow of their fate—beginning with the first sin, on through the Eldian dissent, and into the inherited legacy—all the generational choices made, leading them here, against their consent. Inevitably, this is where they’d find themselves: head to head, heart against heart.  </p><p>Eren is going to fight. Levi sees the monster rising in the deepest fathoms of Eren’s eyes, sees the striated ropes of power coiling through Eren’s arms, as he plunges forward, closing the distance between them, between their faces, imposing the slight vantage of height and width over Levi. Eren’s glare bears down with a personal unforgiveness. He won’t give in unless subdued by physical force, Levi knows this, has always known this about Eren.</p><p>There isn’t any time—</p><p>The commander of the Survey Corps is dying. The childhood friend won’t last much longer. And Eren won’t surrender. Neither will Levi. Standing off, face to face, they oppose the other in every characteristic Levi can think of, antitheses of each other, light where the other is dark and vice versa. As though they are fused at the feet, extended from each other that way, like an hourglass, passing the extract and excesses of one another, in a continuous cycle. And perhaps, furthermore, that is why they could only end up here, prepared to destroy each other if they must, with their intrinsically incompatible compositions, possessed of each other’s excesses.   </p><p>There isn’t any time, so Levi does what is necessary to subdue the monster before it bursts free. An impersonal, disabling violence communicates through the shoulder, through the arm, and finally onto Eren, full on the face, propelling him across the roof until he sprawls to the edge, and lies, face down, sprays of blood spouting from his mouth like vomit.  </p><p>Perhaps Levi is deluding himself: They are not as incompatible as it seems.    </p><p>After all, it takes a monster to subdue a monster.</p><p># # #</p><p>The fire shines on Eren’s cheekbones.</p><p>Levi says, “Your dance with the queen was very convincing. Did you enjoy playing the part of an obedient soldier?”</p><p>“You’re acting out of character,” Eren says. “Is the alcohol taking effect?” </p><p>Eren swivels his head, immobile from the neck down, his eyelashes fanning low, as though in an inconsolable sadness, his flesh softening to the tenderness. Both men think of nothing, swimming inside a dream, looking at each other, as if it were two other men looking at each other. The men begin to lean forward, submerged in an underwater dreamlike veil at a crossroads. The watch ticks in Levi’s pocket, and the men are still turning, but turning away now, their mouths impressed, as if there has been contact. Their eyes are soft, their hair is floating, suspended in the dream.</p><p>Their faces are round as dials with slow, drooped eyelids, lit up by the fire, and Levi doesn’t know what is real or unreal. Did they. . . or did they not? Levi can’t be certain. Only after it has happened does he anticipate the happening. Not unlike a person finding themselves awakened from a long and deep sleep, certain that they had closed the eyes only briefly, feeling unfairly shorted of time.</p><p>“Mikasa was saying something about us,” says Eren. A dreamy syrupiness slows his speech.</p><p>“What was it?”</p><p>“She said we’re incompatible.”</p><p>“She’s not wrong,” says Levi. “We’re irreconcilable.” </p><p>In Levi’s pocket, against his thigh, the watch ticks mechanically, and Levi’s mouth turns into Eren’s, and Eren leans forward, gripping Mikasa in his lap, tucking in his chin to receive the kiss, keeping it, whether purposefully or passively, concealed, turned from the fire, into the thick of shadow and privacy. Levi doesn’t know if Eren knows they are kissing. Levi doesn’t know if Eren knows anything that’s happening, acting on reflex, without any conscious purpose.</p><p>Levi’s palms press on Eren’s chest, leaning more and more weight on his sternum. Eren starts to lie back. But he remains sitting up, whispering, the alcohol potent on his breath: “Wait. I’ll drop Mikasa. She’s—”</p><p>“Don’t let her go, then.”</p><p>Beach sand hisses and gives way to the curves of Eren’s back and calves. Particles sift through his hair, under his head, cool against the blood in his neck. Mikasa sprawls against his chest, falling onto him, fast asleep. Between the captain’s legs, Eren lies flat, cradling Mikasa.</p><p>Eren doesn’t let go, his mouth opening beneath the pressure of Levi’s mouth. Their tongues tuck up against the other. Eren cranes his head, filling the corners of Levi’s mouth with his own mouth, slanting into the natural alignment of their profiles.</p><p>“Wait—” Eren says. Before he can say another word, Levi’s lips press to the center of Eren’s mouth, where it’s the softest, the warmest, with a grave, quieting tenderness. Eren exhales through the nose, against Levi’s face.</p><p>A breath apart, they look at one another now, too close to see each other fully. Views overcome by irises and pupils, eyelashes and pores. No space divides their surfaces, flattened together into a bound, compressed body.</p><p>“But Mikasa—”</p><p>“You’ll injure my feelings,” Levi says, muttering in low, ironic tones. His dark hair falls into his eyes. Cunningly he looks down into Eren’s face. He’s stretched over Eren, looming, pinned on the night sky. His voice reduces to a whisper. “Calling her name like that.”</p><p>“I’m sorry. I can’t think straight. This situation feels strange. Mikasa is asleep.”</p><p>“Would it be less strange if she were awake?”</p><p>“No.”</p><p>“I agree.” Levi leans forward again and says in a whisper, “Don’t let her go. She won’t much appreciate it.”</p><p>Eren swallows. He stares at the constellations spun into the sky. The captain’s palm pets him through the dense material of military wool. Eren doesn’t make a sound. His bicep trembles around Mikasa’s shoulder, clasping her into his side. She lies, dead asleep, with her face over his chest. Beneath her ear, his heart begins to pound, escalating in tempo. His top lip lifts away from his teeth. He goes blind, pulled under into a churning darkness, the sand folding under his cheek like a caressing palm. He doesn’t make a sound.</p><p># # #</p><p>Sealed shut, the tent rattles from the inside. Behind the zipped flap door, Levi flings himself onto hands and knees, still clothed. Eren palms Levi’s stomach, lurching him backward, setting him onto his fours, barely aware.</p><p>Straightening, Eren levels his posture, his knees anchored into the ground, wrestling Levi into position under him. He clasps Levi, still barely aware, around the waist.</p><p>In the curve of Eren’s body, Levi coils with anticipation. Their forms align belly to back. In a small effortless slide, they coalesce, with Levi’s body tucked compactly beneath Eren. Longer, leaner, Eren’s body spans Levi’s spinal column. His thighs lock Levi’s flanks in a firm, bodily hold. His arms fasten Levi down. Eren begins to install himself.</p><p>Eren tautly jerks. Levi tautly jerks in turn, air expelled out of him by brute force. Eren jerks again, hearing the flesh clap where Levi’s shape and his own shape find solid body contact and a connection that is something more thorough, something more defining, than simply penetration.</p><p>Appropriation \ ap·pro·pri·a·tion \ ə-ˌprō-prē-ˈā-shən \</p><p>: to take exclusive possession of</p><p>Eren presses harsh breaths against Levi’s ear. And Levi hisses back at him, deprived of intelligence, dimmed in the eyes to the basest of instincts. The long part of Levi’s hair sprays limply over his forehead. They don’t speak.</p><p>Their double weight falls upon the strength of Levi’s arms alone, braced beneath them. Together, they glide in horizontal repetition, Eren moving through Levi with forceful deep thrusts that punch the breath out of them both each time, the tent rattling sharply once, twice, so on.</p><p>On his hands and knees, Levi’s body strains but yields no give, still dressed, tightly arranged for Eren to lean in with his full weight and, gradually, raise their momentum. Levi’s back flexes with the flow of their bodies, an elastic strength, working with their twofold motion. Like this, Eren rides him tirelessly.</p><p># # #</p><p>The painting hangs on the castle wall. People pass by it, taking pause to admire the artistry and sensationalized aesthetic, satisfying their emptiness with the pleasurable ache of melancholy, like insatiable aristocrats who’ve never felt tragedy and therefore can only desire its romance because they don’t know how to suffer. They look and move on, look and move on . . .</p><p>In front of the painting now stands Eren. He stands a few feet back, with his arms crossed, taking it all in like an impressionable child. The corneas of his eyes fill with the painting, border to border, doubled on the eye-lens like glass. Beneath those faint reflections, his pupils expand, and his weight leans languidly off center. He goes dead-still with staring, as if he were to move at all, he’d miss something.  </p><p>Levi says nothing and watches as Eren’s eyes become two liquid pools of color and ideals foisted on him. Eren hardly breathes. For a long time he stands there, motionless, looking at the painting, the image spilling through the retina, suffusing with something at the crux of Eren’s existence.</p><p>“What do you find so special about that painting?”</p><p>Eren is startled around to face Levi. His arms go down to his sides. “Captain.”</p><p>“What is it, I’m curious.”</p><p>“It’s done well.”</p><p>“Many paintings are done well,” Levi says, and he watches Eren. “Are you thinking you’ll be remembered through it? Preserved, perhaps?”</p><p> “I . . .” Eren’s expression is blank, without depth, his eyes like two cut-outs in his face.</p><p>“It could be destroyed, or lost, or replaced. Who knows?”</p><p>Eren says nothing and looks at him through the cut-outs of his eyes.</p><p>“It won’t make a difference if you’re remembered or if you’re lost. One way or another, you won’t be a part of it,” Levi says. “You’ll only be dead.”</p><p># # #</p><p>Levi’s chest is planted to the floor of the tent, face turned in profile, his hips lifted, his body folded back, nearly in half, for Eren to continue at a vantage. Eren buries himself, mashed to the nub of Levi’s tailbone. Sunk exquisitely deep, Eren makes a whimpering trembling moan.</p><p>The positioning compresses Levi’s spine, straining the arch in his body further. Numbness fills his arms and thighs. Compressed and strained, Levi lets Eren manipulate him, wrangle him, into submission. Levi can hardly breathe. Sweat pours down his face and back muscles. An artery surges down along Eren’s pelvis, weighing him with hot, pulsating tension. He is close.</p><p>“Captain Levi,” Eren says, breathlessly, and Levi says nothing. Eren’s stopped fucking him. “Do you know what a messiah is?”</p><p>“No.” Levi inhales and pushes on his palm to ease the positioning. He can’t move.</p><p>“He’s a savior.”</p><p>“Hah.” Levi relaxes his palm. His vision has begun to fade. “Are you an idiot?”</p><p>###</p><p>
  <em>A Fragment: 03 / Body</em>
</p><p>It is not a question of ethics. Whether corporal punishment is right or wrong. Whether using a boy’s body to deceive the jury is forgivable. Whether following orders, unconditionally, is living.</p><p>Is it the right choice to chain up a fifteen-year-old boy and use him to carry out Erwin’s scheme? Levi doesn’t explore this thinking: he does as he is told, unquestioningly. The commander of the Survey Corps is watching, along with the other two branches of the military and their leaders, and above all, the high general himself.</p><p>
  <em>I will scare you to death, Eren Jaeger. And I will scare them too, all the way to their graves, those idiots. Scream, cry— Go on, serve the purpose intended for you.</em>
</p><p>Eren doesn’t scream or cry, though he appears wounded, at the very least. Wounded, at the crux of his ego. And yet his eyes don’t fade, glowing like a predator’s, his body straining impressively against the iron chains. Eren’s face whips to the side, struck by the insole of Levi’s military boot.</p><p>As expected, the MP intervene: “Wait . . . Captain Levi. What if you make him angry?”</p><p>Levi seizes Eren’s hair, upturning Eren’s face, his wrist flexing in an unforgiving, theatrical jerk, and Eren pants, his eyes filmed and hot with fresh pain. Levi leans in, close enough to kiss him, smelling the blood and the sweat and the puffs of warm broken breath. </p><p>Yes, what if.</p><p>Are you afraid?</p><p>Show me.</p><p># # #</p><p>Don’t fall asleep. Don’t fall asleep. Don’t fall asleep.</p><p>Gradually, Eren reclaims more of himself, losing the alcoholic dreamscape. He lies on his back, wrapped in a bedding of discarded clothing, wrapped in skin and musk. Across the tent, the captain seems to have plunged into something far deeper than sleep, lying in a naked sprawl, spread out on his belly. In the dark, he is all edges.</p><p>Don’t fall asleep.</p><p>Eren reaches over and presses his chest along the span of Levi’s muscular back. He outlines Levi’s arms with his own arms, taking on the captain’s dead-like bodyframe, putting his face in Levi’s hair, careening mentally, physiologically, into a panic. He closes his eyes, gasping, suffocating under a wet rag of fear. His thoughts circle: <em>You’ll be all right</em>, <em>You’ll be all right, You’ll be—</em></p><p>His thoughts keep circling until his body believes himself and he dissolves upon Levi’s shoulder blades. His breathing slows, but he remains too hot. Beneath the panic wells up sorrow. Eren doesn’t resist the sorrow. He wonders, if he were to ask— No, he would never ask.</p><p>Lying within the breadth of Levi’s shoulders, like he may never move again, he grieves his own death, bereaved of himself and of the man sleeping beneath him. </p><p> </p><p> (Please remember me)</p><p># # #</p><p>Levi: Is the value of what’s been lost equal to that which has been gained?</p><p>Eren: No. And it never could be.  </p><p># # #</p><p>Eren bolts upright, his heart hammering, seized by the remembering of that day, and the day before that, invasive memories regurgitating through his mind like a sickness. Memories that belong to him. Memories that do not belong to him.</p><p>When he goes to take a breath, it doesn’t come. His vision explodes with a hot faintness. The world diminishes. He clutches at his neck. His windpipe is gripped shut. He scrapes at the fingers seizing him in a chokehold. A pair of eyes shudder from out of a darkening world, familiar, blank with depthless unrecognition. Gasping, Eren stares at the captain through dying, glazing eyes, the consciousness squeezed from his face. His scrabbling hands cease scrabbling. He yields to Levi’s chokehold. The captain releases him.</p><p>Eren croaks through the dry pain in his throat. When he looks up at the captain, he sees Levi watching him, shrunk away a little, with a wearied, vacant expression. His hand is still gripped around the shape of Eren’s windpipe.</p><p>Eren inhales. His voice, when he speaks, comes out a hiss. “I startled you, right? I woke up too suddenly.”</p><p>“Are you injured?” Levi says.</p><p>“No, not anymore. See?” Eren turns his neck to the side. Levi looks and says nothing, his eyes like tin. Eren relaxes his neck. “It’s all right,” he says. “Anyway, you were sleeping soundly and I woke you. Why don’t you get more rest? It’s not even light out, and we have a long day ahead of us.”  </p><p>“What were you dreaming about that woke you so suddenly?”</p><p>“I—” Panic quickens Eren’s pulse, and he feels that he has been sleeping for a long time, the dreams and the memories floating in his head, indistinguishable from the other, like ships on whitecaps, tossed on a dark churning sea; he feels that his life has been, up until this moment, only a hallucination, none of it real.</p><p>His hand trembles. He catches his right hand in his left, gripping them both still. “I don’t remember,” he says.  </p><p>Sitting under the blankets, the captain has a leg pulled up, an arm rested on his knee. “My memory is unreliable, too,” he says. “I can only seem to recall parts of last night.”</p><p>“Captain.”</p><p>“What is it?”</p><p>“I wasn’t myself. I’d had too much to drink.”</p><p>“Yes. I don’t suppose you and I would be sharing this tent if you’d been yourself.”</p><p>“Sir?”</p><p>Levi turns his head. His eyes come steady on Eren with flatness and ill-humor—and, possibly, disappointment.</p><p>“Are you angry with me?” Eren says. — Are you disappointed in me?</p><p>“Not really.”</p><p>“You seem angry.” — Disappointed.</p><p>“I’m not.” — You are.</p><p>“Captain, I know I startled you awake,” Eren says. “And you only had a natural reaction to it. I don’t blame you.”</p><p>Levi exhales and his mouth sets in rigid downturn. Briefly his eyes shut. “This situation is troublesome.” Levi throws off the blanket, and it opens onto his nakedness. Eren averts his eyes. “And I’m feeling unsettled that I let it go this far.”</p><p>“This far?” Eren watches Levi forego underwear, clapping on a pair of wool military trousers. His palm carefully tucks himself in. The zipper purrs closed.</p><p>Levi’s upper body writhes into a plain black shirt, his stomach boiling with muscle as he wrests it over his head. A moment, his compact stomach remains uncovered, the shirt rolled in a twist at the center of his ribcage. He tugs it down. The captain’s motions are sensual without intent, unconsciously furnished with sex appeal, and Eren stares and almost misses it, his eyes moving away, then moving back, to watch the captain’s half-dressed body.</p><p>Levi sits. He starts to put on his boots. Eren says, “What are you trying to say?”</p><p>“I know I’m not making any sense to you,” says Levi, “you’re still only a kid—” Eren’s teeth grind together. Levi’s eyes flash to him. He waits for it. Eren doesn’t argue. “We embark in a couple hours. Are you ready?”</p><p>“I don’t have a choice.”</p><p>“Mm.” The captain’s vocal cords slide deeply, languorously in his throat. His voice is all tones, no volume. “That’s right. You don’t have that luxury.”</p><p>Eren knows what he must do. And he knows among the threads of possible outcomes, none will end in his survival. He knows this. And he knows Levi knows this too.</p><p>Just—</p><p>###</p><p>
  <em>A Fragment: 04 / Tragedy</em>
</p><p>“Have you ever heard of the ocean?”</p><p>There’s no time for listening, but Levi listens. He listens and looks at Eren, although there’s no time for this either. Prone and prostrate on the rooftop, Eren has reached out, feebly gripping Levi’s ankle, holding onto the captain, the precious childhood slipping from his grasp.</p><p>“It was a dream,” Eren says, feebly holding on, “that I had forgotten.” Phantoms and ghosts and forsaken hopes all reside in Eren’s upturned face, the residue of titan neural pathways dragging down his cheekbones.</p><p>Although Levi hadn’t known it then, Eren wields history the way soldiers maneuver with their gear, unconstrained by direction. Past and future and liminal tangents all at Eren’s command. And on some plane among infinite realities, Eren is already dead. And they have already lost him.</p><p>Maybe those childish hopes were forgotten from Eren because he has the broken memory of a senile old man. Maybe, still, he’d forgotten for a different reason.</p><p> “Clear out.”</p><p># # #</p><p>Where the horizon falls, a blue light begins to appear. The sun is poised beneath the ocean and the ocean itself projects the sky’s face, like glass and mirrors, reiterating themselves into eternity. Levi folds his arms. The night clings to Eren’s face, in his eye sockets, under his cheekbones.</p><p>After some time, the sun breaks free of the water, and Eren and Levi could be vanquished by the sunburst of morning. The iron ships float on a glass-smooth calm. Levi lowers his eyes. Foam clings to his boots. The sun breaks open and spills, and on the ocean’s surface, an inversion of the morning descends, wrinkling on the water.</p><p>“It’s pretty,” says Eren.</p><p>Levi says nothing, his arms folded over his chest, his eyes fixed to the inversion of sunrise wrinkled on the water. The night still hangs to Eren’s face.</p><p>“I guess I should find Mikasa and Armin,” Eren says, and he sounds old, “and prepare to embark.” He salutes and turns and strides out of Levi’s peripheral, and doesn’t look back.   </p><p>Time plays with the mind. It seems the moment has passed before Levi knows it’s happened. Only seconds ago, Eren was a boy. Now war is upon them.</p><p>Levi puts his hand in his pocket and prepares to set out to sea.</p>
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